A New York VC Spotlight: Pedro Torres Picón of Quotidian Ventures

Pedro Torres Picón came to the United States from Venezuela and founded Quotidian Ventures in 2010. It is a seed stage fund venture, and Picon’s passion lies in “helping founders create technology products that modernize large industries in which they have deep domain expertise.” He is also the reFounder (sic) of Matchbook, an app designed to help you remember the places you come across.

The fund focuses mostly on Big Data, Location Based Services, and Mobile Commerce. They invest in companies with technology products that modernize large existing industries and in founding teams with unique and proprietary knowledge of the industry they are modernizing. They also tend to focus on the earliest stages of a product’s development, when it’s often pre-product and pre-VC, and on products that represent a radical efficiency leap when compared to existing alternatives, and they prefer New York City-based companies. Their investments include Comprehend, an end-to-end insights and collaboration for life science companies; FieldLens, a mobile field management app for the construction industry; and Locu, a group building software to help local businesses.

Picón has a degree in Banking and Finance from Universidad Metropolitana in Venezuela. He is also an Advisory Board Member at the Bronx Academy of Software Engineering.

On helping companies find the right experts: “In today’s startup marketplace, we tend to overvalue founding teams with experience building technology products and undervalue teams with domain expertise in the particular market being addressed.”

On the questions he asked when investing: “Is the market big and can the product be big? Are these the people to build this thing? Does someone on the team have the right expertise for this market?”

On Ron Conway’s advice to him about becoming an investor: “’You want to be an investor? Go invest. Until then, you’re a meeting-taker.’”